Does HN have any guidance on when and why to downvote ? Or just personally ?

You are stealing: downvote. You are playing music too loud: downvote, right away. Driving too fast: downvote. Slow: downvote. You are charging too high prices for sweaters, glasses: you get downvoted. You undercook fish? Believe it or not, Downvote. You overcook chicken, also downvote. Undercook, overcook. You make an appointment with the dentist and you don't show up, believe it or not, downvote, right away. We have the best patients in the world because of downvoting.

If he steals things from a thief, will you downvote ?

If the urgency bus drive too fast, will you downvote ?

If he playing music too loud under the rain, will you downvote ?

...

Whoosh: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eiyfwZVAzGw :)

It’s a humorous commentary on how fickle HN karma can be

Paul Graham has posted his thoughts about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

I think that sites really shouldn't have guidance on this sort of thing, because nobody would follow it anyway. If you only have upvotes and downvotes, people are just going to upvote stuff they like and downvote stuff they don't like, and any individual will have different rules about what "like" or "doesn't like" means to them.

Waaaaay back in the day, I did like how Slashdot had different categories for voting, e.g. "Insightful", "Funny", "Off topic", etc.

> Waaaaay back in the day, I did like how Slashdot had different categories for voting, e.g. "Insightful", "Funny", "Off topic", etc.

Even that got abused, as comments people didn't like would be modded off-topic or troll.

It may just be a natural internet behavior to suppress that which you disagree with.

If you remove the word ‘internet’ you’re right in track.

I'd like to see a site that punishes people for downvoting for the wrong reason.

Honestly we don't need downvoting at all. Just upvoting to allow good stuff to rise, and flagging for hate speech and illegal stuff.

Can't disagree with this enough. Twitter exists, and it sucks. Every site that only allows upvoting becomes a segregated cesspool as different factions just cheerlead in their own tribal zones.

Twitter sucks for other reasons, not because they disallow downvoting.

Please, pray tell, how would you even determine if something was "for the wrong reason".

Slashdot had metamoderation, where you were asked whether various anonymized votes/tags were valid or not.

The same applied for "upvote"

I wonder how it would work if we had different kinds of upvote/downvote.

Then again if given a choice between "I disagree" and "you're a moron for saying that", people would just pick second if it is a disagreement about something they feel strongly about

Personally, I would find that helpful.

When my comments get downvoted, sometimes I can figure out why. It's frivolous, off-topic, just plain wrong, etc.

But quite often, I have no idea whatsoever, and I'm always curious about what the issue was. I think potentially valuable information and personal learning is lost.

In my experience it's when you post something that someone has a strong opposing opinion about. Same for flagging, seems to be treated as a super-downvote most of the time.

In the guidelines, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html see the section "In Comments". Comments violating those guidelines are reasonable candidates for downvoting.

In theory : Does the comment contribute to the conversation?

In practice : Pure jellyfish-brain embrace/reject reaction. A gaggle of flatworms with keyboards